Assistant Professor
Bard College
Dominique Townsend is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School and Ph.D. from Columbia University in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research is stimulated by productive tensions in Buddhist cultures, such as the relationship between the cultivation of the arts and renunciation. Dominique’s primary interests include Buddhist poetics, pedagogy, and institutionalized charisma. Her current project, based on her dissertation research, focuses on aesthetics and cosmopolitanism in Tibetan Buddhism, with a particular focus on the history of Mindrölling Monastery.